The old death contemplation redux
Jeroen
Not all those who wander are lostNetherlands Veteran
I’ve been in a reflective mood and revisiting some of my old posts, seeing what new things I would like to add, as a lot of these topics are cyclical. Here’s the original post from 2020:
https://newbuddhist.com/discussion/26453/the-nine-contemplations-of-atisha
To recap, Atisha stated the body was fragile, death was inevitable, and nothing could help. It’s a great meditation for bringing home the immediacy of life, bringing you into the present moment (which is all there ever is). It also focuses you on the spiritual life as the one thing that can possibly help.
But there I think we go astray. Priests since time immemorial have traded upon the afterlife, getting people to do things in today’s world in return for favours in the afterlife. But there is no hard evidence for such things, the mists of psychedelic vision are notoriously fickle and full of illusion. I’m no longer inclined to believe priests, or their asking after real-world payments.
Where does that leave us, with no well defined afterlife or cosmology? Well, it seems to me the result of the death contemplation is to focus on living life. Trade in money for free time, enjoy life, live a little. It may be better to go on a bicycle ride around the forest on a sunny day than to spend time in the office, you never know how many good days you have left.
Comments
death and life is in us. things die,things born. ma earth is boss. meditating on death is a good thing to me. it motivate the one life, one shot philosphy. it light a fire in my butt, to live fully,now and hopely my mantra, be be safe,be smart,be well let me time to alighn my wish be an ok, and fair to my self and to others, untill my last breath.
death can be viewed in zen the void nature. the more i be the void in practice, death is not so scarey to me. not there yet. zen is practice. the void is everthy and nothing in dao
earth.
That old contemplative mood struck again, and I still think Atisha’s nine points are amongst the most significant things written about life in general.
So if they point us to the spiritual life, what do I consider the spiritual life to be? Well in a way it has to do with what is natural life. If we consider all the world’s religions are based on scriptures written by priests, largely for their own purposes, we can discount anything that mentions heaven and hell as an attempt to manipulate. That eliminates 99% of all religious scripture right there.
So if religion is not about heaven and hell, what is it about? Well, some people have said that states of happiness and unhappiness exist in the here and now. Most people chase happiness and avoid unhappiness. A lot of that has to do with the mind, because except for simple body things like a stubbed toe, the mind determines whether you feel happy or unhappy. In a way, whether your ‘now’ is a heaven or a hell has to do with the state of your mind.
Now your mind is full of ideas and old decisions based on what parents, teachers, chatbots and so on have told you, and at some point you will have to sit down and review them and see if they are still relevant. We tend to carry a lot of preconceived notions which we have to let go of.
Buddhism is great at convincing us to let go of old stuff. But let’s not forget to follow our joy in life, to celebrate living, not to think too much about yesterday or tomorrow.
Written a bit with @Ning in mind…
In a way, being happy has to do with simple things. If we disregard the mind and just step away from it, we can feel content just in the body, in the senses. So learning to look away from the mind is an essential skill, and there are various techniques which teach this, including meditation. Eventually instead of being like a wild horse and going where it wills, the mind becomes an able servant. Going beyond being content to being truly happy or even blissful has to do with managing the mind in this state.
But this is getting well beyond the simple state of things at the beginning, into sketching an outline of the mystical path. In essence the part of Buddhism that I am interested in is the managing of the mind. There are other parts, like the cosmology of the different realms where you can be reincarnated and so on, but nobody can authoritatively explore or discuss those, and so who is to say that that is accurate or just somebody’s dream?
There are a number of parts of Buddhism that come across as comforting, or supporting the status quo. These are things like Karma and Reincarnation. Choosing to believe them is a question of personal preference, but it certainly helps make the mind happy to let it think it has all the answers.